


Twenty-Five Things that Happened Next

by Stultiloquentia



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Future Fic, M/M, Multi, Politics, Polyamory, Printing Presses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-25
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-28 21:56:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6347152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stultiloquentia/pseuds/Stultiloquentia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Slices of life and love in post-revolution Amestris.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twenty-Five Things that Happened Next

1.

Rush Valley annually celebrates St. Ollie's Day, the patron saint of genderfuck. It's more week than day, lately: an enormous, glittery festival complete with a parade, drag shows, and a masque, obscenely-shaped lollipops and rampant commercialism. It's also, RV being RV, the annual technology bazaar, in which everybody comes to hawk their latest ingenious "It's a telephone! And a toaster oven!" inventions, ooh and aah over automail prototypes, model rockets and sporty cars they'll never be able to afford, schmooze and flirt and network and party.

One year, Winry befriends, sort of accidentally, a traveling vibrator saleswoman. Vibrators in Amestris are similar to real-world 1930s tech: alarming-looking things that look like hair dryers with enormous motors, that come as vacuum cleaner attachments or nestled in kitschy satin-lined cases. Winry's examining the mechanism of one such beast, chatting up the seller and thinking about motorcycles and music boxes and Edward's fingers, and before she knows it, she's behind the cart, with the saleslady peering interestedly over her shoulder, sketching an insertable version. An hour passes. They order gyros from the cart a few stalls down, and keep talking. The saleslady eventually offers to commission a prototype. Winry panics a bit—she's hardly a shy flower, but this is not exactly how she planned to make a reputation for herself—and (only a little wistfully) declines. She's happy to let the seller keep the notes, though (not a canny, cutthroat entrepreneur, our Winry), and that good lady eventually gives them to another maker. About a year later, Winry's extremely startled to get one of the first units in the mail. She does end up sending sketches and suggestions to both the seller and the supplier, and winds up as a sort of informal silent partner, who gets a free supply of rather pricy merchandise forevermore. Ed thinks it's hilarious. He benefits, too, even more so as the product lines diversify ... although the epithet "the full-of-metal alchemist" has been unilaterally banned from their bedroom.

2.

Rush Valley, for obvious reasons, is the massage artist capital of the nation. Winry locates a particular genius at unlocking lopsided backs, to whom Ed goes for a vigorous pounding whenever he's in town. It takes half a dozen visits for Ed to twig that said personage is a retired Xingese ladyboy. It doesn't phase Ed in the slightest, but it's actually a case where Ed's good manners and Ruolan's taciturn professionalism obstruct what could have been a most interesting friendship. Ed never does learn that Ruolan's perspective on biological alchemy, and the rule of equivalent exchange, is at least as personal, colourful and fraught as Ed's own.

3.

Gracia stays in Central. She's always had a wide circle of friends and an intellectual life that had nothing to do with Maes, but she's also close to Maes' city-based siblings, especially Margotte at the university. She moves apartments, but hosts just as often, and is partly responsible for the intimacy that springs up between Al and Roy, once Al moves back to Central. She makes a living as an artist and technical illustrator. Seven years after Maes' death, she marries a doctor with whom she collaborates on an anatomy text. He's a good egg.

4.

Once Ed finishes growing, his jaw and Roy's shove out at exactly the same altitude.

5.

Before Ed and Al hie off in their respective directions, Winry hands out going away presents in the form of deadly weaponry. Four inch utility knives, to be precise, with matching clip point blades, sharp enough to shave with. Ed's comes with a boot sheath. Al gets a state-of-the-art linerlock that's so sweetly balanced it almost makes Ed waver in his preference for a fixed blade. 

They're gorgeous. But after the knives have been duly admired, the boys, in their awkward, boyish way, produce gifts for each other—and there's a little round of startled laughter when these boxes also match, though this time it had to be accident. Ed and Al lock eyes as they trade packages nearly of a size with the knives, and—Winry's not jealous; it'd be stupid to be _jealous_ over what she sees in their faces, but they're clearly having some kind of moment. One of those moments that gives her a little pang of wistfulness that she never had a sister. She looks over Ed's arm as he flicks the clasp of the sleek, embossed case with his thumb, and lifts out his fountain pen. He looks back up and lifts his chin, and Al's eyes sparkle in return, and it looks to Winry like a promise.

When Ed comes home, one of the gifts he brings for Winry is a just-barely-invented toy called a Slinky. It soon becomes clear that he should have brought back Slinkies for everyone he's ever met. 

6.

Al masters Alkahestry in Xing, comes back and burns his way through a stack of equivalency exams, then shops around for somebody to supervise him through a multidisciplinary Ph.D. He publishes that two-and-a-half years later, then vanishes back east, whence he sends a steady stream of translations and commentaries for his brother to publish. These are sufficiently well-received that the next time he comes home, he gets offered a choice tenure-track appointment at Central U. He turns it down, because it's a public institution, and he doesn't want his research under the thumb of the government. Accepts a lower-paying gig at the smaller, independent, private university outside of Central, increasing their prestige, pissing off a bunch of people, and getting a good research deal, if in less amazing lab facilities. Also, the campus is prettier. He negotiates an every-third-year sabbatical, and spends the off-years in Xing. 

7.

Ling Yao says to the emperor ... whoa, wait, that _is_ a whole story. Please stand by.

8.

Scieska's ace.

9.

Mr. Garfiel's lover is a tall, lean, nomadic woman in suspenders and a wide-brimmed hat, with cropped hair and prominent crow's feet. Doesn't mean they're not both queer as snake shoes, but who does whom how between the sheets is nobody's business but their own.

10.

Ed and Winry have a Roy clause. 

It was established after the Promised Day, but before Ed went on his tour, on a lazy, sun-soaked afternoon, out-of-doors and well away from civilization, following a discussion of Ed's virginity-obliterating fling with Ling (Winry is _fascinated_ by this facet of her boyfriend). 

"Did you ever think about General Mustang that way?" 

"WHAT. WHAT?!" 

She coaxes him to admit that it may, once or twice, have crossed his awareness that Mustang, whatever his other monumental and overwhelming faults, is really a pretty exceptional specimen, and then she coaxes him into fantasizing about it. He leans against her, back to chest, against the old, disused, sun-baked stone wall, and she murmurs in his ear, and opens his shirt (again), and he flushes from hairline to groin. It's a moment. It's taboo, and stupidly hot, and Winry's an enormous slasher. They talk about him quietly, after: "He must be very lonely." "What? He's a player!" "Oh come on, Ed, you _know_ that's a front. He loves Riza, but he can't really act on it, not as her commander, and she'll never let anyone else take over watching his back." "Aw, Win, don't make me start feeling sorry for the bastard." "You already do. You like him a lot."

It all stays in the hypothetical, until after Ed comes back from his tour of Creta, Sperana and points west, five years down the line. He's in Central, visiting Al. He's been in correspondence, but hasn't seen anyone for years, so it's a crazy time, jammed with reunions and visits and business, talking and more talking, pub nights with old friends, colleagues, Al's university crowd, and Ed and Al practically tripping over themselves trying to tell each other all the things they've found, planning the future, worrying about politics, scheming and plotting and grinning like maniacs. It's heady and kind of gorgeous. Roy's there, too, as one of Al's people, which takes some mental hopscotch, intrigued and acute, and just a little apart from it all, as he always was. There's dinner with Gracia, and drinks at Roy's when Ed stops by to drop off the manuscript he promised, and—conversation, really amazing conversation. And Ed realizes something could happen. It doesn't, not then. 

Ed calls Winry the next morning, before breakfast. Reminds himself afterward to leave Al a note for the phone bill. 

Next time, at the end of the night, Edward lays his palm against Roy's cheek. 

"You," says Roy, struck.

"For ages," Ed replies, mature, clear-eyed, fond.

"We've joked, you know, Winry and I, about having room for you, but all in fun. Yesterday I had to call home. This isn't the kind of thing you spring on the woman you intend to spend your life with without making damned sure you're really on the same page." 

"This is just a one-time thing," Roy acknowledges. 

"I didn't say that," says Ed. 

11.

Ed has nightmares, of the moment he lost his arm and couldn't keep Al from sacrificing himself to restore it, that flow into waking hallucinations that his arm is still missing. He spent so many years with the weight of automail that the lightness of flesh can feel like absence. He grips his own arm and knows it's there, knows it's just his own special brand of post-traumatic stress coming in past due, but try telling that to his nervous system.

Roy has nightmares, of course (who doesn't?), but no other form of battle shock. "You'd think at least I'd have developed an aversion to barbeque," he remarks, dry as sand.

"I've met alchemists who fought in Ishbal who can't touch a transmutation circle without vomiting." 

He tells Ed, too, on a quiet, misty night, walking home after an anniversary, "Gracia Hughes knew exactly what was underneath her husband's smile. He didn't want her to, at first. He was so sure he was going to come home and pack the entire war into a very small box in the corner of his mind and never, ever open the lid where she could see. Those were...an ugly few months."

Ed absorbs this, lining it up with the happy, generous man he knew too briefly and the woman he's come to love. "No," he says, "I can't see Mrs. Hughes putting up with any man-crap." Such a Winry word.

Roy laughs, wry and gentle. "No. She has a gift of seeing not only exactly who people are, but who they need to be."

12.

Hohenheim leaves his sons a fortune. Nonplussed, and not in want, they ignore it for years. After they return home from their various travels, though, they think of something interesting to which to apply it: they buy out a small, independent press. Al takes a thirty-five percent share, but it's Ed's baby. He hires an accountant, but retains the rest of the tiny staff and apprentices himself to the elderly printmaster. After a proper squabble over an increasingly ridiculous list of names, they dub it Elric Imprints.

It starts as a vanity press, essentially. It's a huge gamble, but they've both got _trunks_ of papers taking up floor space by this point, and they did the homework on all of Amestris' major printing houses, including the university's, and deemed each, in Ed's words, "money-grubbing, censorious sinkholes of suck." So they learn the ropes with some minor pamphlets and essay compilations, and when those go down tolerably well, Al fishes the ace out of his sleeve. It's, oh, you know, just a little project he's been penning for some years called _Principles of Alkahestry_. 

The first printing sells out within weeks. Point made, the brothers embark on a systematic campaign to sabotage the alchemical community's cult of secrecy. There are plenty of basic texts floating around, and specialists without students to inherit will often publish, in their declining years, a "life's work" volume, but there's astonishingly little crosspollination among living alchemists. Shou Tucker sacrificed his soul to invent a technique the military had already perfected. Ed, Al and Izumi all paid a dear toll attempting the downright impossible. Flame alchemy was invented and lost twice before Berthold Hawkeye passed the burden to Riza. 

Ed, who has contacts everywhere, a reputation as a straight shooter, and charisma coming out his ears, turns out to be bloody good at acquisitions. He reaps the seeds he planted on his western tour, securing rights to _Planchet's Metaphysics_ , _Le pois et le poignard_ , _The Atom_. He commissions some things. He and Al have a horrible argument about whether or not to publish on human transmutation. What he really wants, though, is a journal. International, jointly edited, and crammed with as many bitchy editorials as possible. Having spent time in the coastal cities of Nondres and Pandoq, attending lectures at the chemists' guild, hollering about ontology over beers with members of the Empirical Society, losing whole days in the Bibliothèque al'Mair, it's unbearable that such a thing doesn't already exist. Amestris has never felt so small. 

13.

Riza does not react well to the information that Roy and Ed are sometime lovers. She realizes, for the first time, something fundamental about the phrase "unspoken agreement" and rebukes herself for unforgivable naïveté. She hides it all, and carries on. There's work needs doing.

14.

In the East, Al studies with a monastic order that practices tantric alchemy. He's stunned to learn that their most disciplined adepts can access the Gate purely through meditation, instead of forcing it open via human transmutation. He meets monks and nuns who wield its energy with a hundred times the sophistication of any Amestrian, but wholly peacefully. They are capable of other wonders, too: two transmutations at once, with circles formed of thumb and middle finger of each hand. Multi-person transmutations. Thousand-year-old martial arts traditions based on the four great elements. Al never masters most of these techniques, but he receives permission to translate certain scrolls pertaining to their philosophy:

> _All things come into being,_  
>  And I see thereby their return.  
>  All things flourish,  
>  But each one returns to its root.  
>  This return to its root means tranquility.  
>  It is called returning to the Tao. 

  
15.

Roy's presidential campaign lasts a whole eleven weeks. He's losing to Armstrong. So is a third candidate, a senior MP with a background in law, named Laur Douglas. Roy and Armstrong, focused on each other, haven't been paying much attention to her. Other people have. Laur contacts him and says, without much prologue, "I want you to fold your campaign and run as my vice president." Roy says, "'Scuse what? No." Laur says, "No, listen, dumbass, I'm serious. Think about it."

Ed, when polled, folds his arms and says, "Hm." Roy feels a pang for the good old days of windmilling and bellowing.

Al, sounding annoyingly Ed-ish, remarks, "Well, you're losing. And I think Douglas is interesting."

The brothers have backed Roy privately, but refused to stump. Roy's a bit surprised when Ed offers up the print shop as a meeting place. He accedes, sheds most of his staff in exchange for one Alphonse parked downstairs with a backgammon set and a mug of chocolate: an innocuous and insuperable bodyguard.

Laur Douglas is a tall, square-shouldered, horse-faced woman with a ribbon on her sleeve for the students slain in the revolution. She looks like she'd be perfectly comfy firing a musket herself, but she's a civilian unto the tenth generation. Which is rather the point.

Roy looks her in the eye and asks, "What do you want for this country?"

"Choices," Laur Douglas says immediately. 

Smooth. Roy feels the corners of his mouth pull up. He pulls out a chair.

And listens to her explain why, if he stuffs his pride and a twenty-year dream and joins her ticket, they're going to win.

16.

Maria Ross makes captain, takes a masters in Eastern languages so she can make major, gets a pair of citations for quick thinking minimizing loss of life during the student revolution, becomes an aunt, gets assigned to the diplomatic corps, almost dies of white pox, becomes the second foreigner ever to receive the Emperor's Medallion, and beds Lieutenant General Olivier Mira Armstrong. Only once, but it totally ranks with the rest of the Key Life Milestones.

17.

Selim Bradley's body stops growing at a physical age of seven, though his mind continues to mature. He's a sweet boy, and then an anguished teen. At age twenty, he commits suicide.

18.

One of Winry's most important memories of Roy is of coming downstairs on a chilly morning and finding him already up, dressed in a woolly sweater and kneeling on the hearth, lighting a fire with a plain, long-stemmed match. He looks up at her and smiles—a sweet, new, almost shy expression. 

She's only begun to smile back when she hears the kettle begin to boil, so she goes to the kitchen and pours, and when she returns with a mug of tea in each hand, the big log is already burning, beautifully, of course, and Roy is still on the rug, sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees like a child. He accepts his tea with a murmur of thanks, and Winry drops down beside him.

Winry ducks her head, letting the steam from the mug bathe her chin, and looks at him sidelong. His eyes, staring into the bright, domesticated little blaze, are half-lidded, meditative. Maybe that's precisely what it is, Winry thinks: a meditation, a training ritual of some kind. Or—what does she know?—perhaps it's just blunt obsession. A sort of addiction. Pyrophilia? What does a man named Flame need from a hearth fire? She's never seen Roy's devastating talent, though she's heard people speak of it. _"...an entire platoon, in seconds..." "...had to go by the dental records..." "...went_ around _me, and I didn't even singe my braid...."_

Roy shifts his socked feet a little closer to the screen, and sighs, and suddenly Winry thinks: _fire for warmth_. Perhaps, for a man like Roy, such a thing is worth recalling. Worthy of a bit of ritual, on a cold November day. Fire for comfort, fire for pleasure. She clears her throat and says softly, "It's lovely. Isn't it?"

Roy blinks out of his reverie and looks over at her. An intense experience, being looked at straight on by those black eyes. But then, after no more than a moment, curiosity and surprise open up his features, and he nods.

19.

There's a comic book. Dear God, not official or authorized or (ha and also ha) _true_ ; it's sort of semi-underground, like a zine or doujinshi. You have to know where to go to get them (it took poor Havoc and Breda months to find a source), but whenever there's a new installment they seem like they're ubiquitous. Paninya collects the damned things. Sneaks up on Winry when she's got both hands occupied and reads the smuttiest parts aloud. The author, identity unknown and much speculated upon, goes by "Metallurgy". 

20.

Olivier receives two serious marriage proposals in her life, not counting all the letters from fortune seekers sent to her father before she came of age. One took place when she was still a cadet; she never speaks of it. The other is from the Drachman ambassador, ten months shy of her fiftieth birthday. He's a magnificent, hilarious, over-the-top figure of a man, very much her equal, and genuinely in love. Olivier is so impressed by his sheer chutzpah that she finds herself tempted to reward it. Sense wins out: she is simply not the marrying kind. She cheerfully invites him to bed, though, and they maintain a intellectually satisfying and epically raunchy friendship for years.

21.

"...swear to God it was Christmas. And you're never gonna believe who was on her arm."

"Don't tell the general; his head will explode, and then all the coffee will escape," is all Breda says.

22.

Roy, being his mother's son, is an excellent dancer. Chris was one of the first girls in town to own a phonograph, but even before that, there were always musicians around, drooping on the fire escapes with their cigarillos and mandolins, leaving clarinet reeds soaking next to the toothpaste. They taught Roy to speak from the diaphragm, to tell 3/4 from 6/8, and how to work a crowd, not to mention how to apply fake eyelashes and rock a feather boa. The girls swung him about, showed him how to hold on and where to look; the boys let him stand on their shoes. More than once they tried to dress him in a tiny zoot suit and get him on stage, but Chris was having none of that. 

Teenaged Roy taught Riza how to swing in Master Hawkeye's gloomy parlour, and sometimes, when they could spring it, at the dance hall in town. Riza taught Roy all the two-steps the old people liked, and then Roy, trying to look cooler than he felt, would saunter up to the band leader and ask for a bebop. Later, it's Roy and Gracia who clear the floor when they go out as a group. Riza's no slouch, and gets lots of offers, and Maes, affable and marginally competent, enjoys the hell out of everything, but Gracia's got butterflies on the soles of her shoes, and Roy is Roy, and together they always manage to draw applause at least once a night. 

Later still, Riza and Winry bond over passing it on to Winry. By then, though, it's a different scene, a newborn age of collision and collusion. Armistices are pushing open Amestris' borders, and while Grumman hashes out trade agreements, and Edward works his tail off trying to germinate an international scientific community, artists are simply wandering across to find out who's jamming on the other side. Isbalan music is all the rage, with its slinky polymodes and skirling rhythms. Über-cool Aerugan syncopations are finding homes in Amestrian rhythm sections, and there are twelve new ways to shake your ass invented every weekend.

Ed can't dance worth a damn, unless you put him in one of the new clubs where all you have to do is twist your hips and stomp a bit and look good in leather, but he loves to go to shows when he can, and mails records back to Paninya. Roy feels old. Chris Mustang feels young. Miles looks good in leather. Hawkeye notices. Amestris grooves on.

23.

From the Department of You're Not Done Till You're Dead: Comes a day when Edward defeats a bad guy that no one else can, by virtue of being an adept theoretical alchemist with no Gate. 

Partial credit goes to Havoc, who was struck with revelation while watching Catalina's ass as she hooked a set of jumper cables to a car battery.

24.

It takes Roy and Riza twenty-six years. Had to; it takes no less than that to get free and out of range of the double helix of guilt and redemption they'd have wrapped each other in. It takes other people, friends and lovers, separate peace. Learning not only how to love, but to be good for another soul. It takes political failure and political success; it takes a village. It takes a different era, but the same old slippers.

They're sitting together on a bench a few blocks from parliament. Roy's telling some dumb story, and Riza laughs out loud, a bright, clear, unwounded sound that carries up into the linden branches overhead and makes heads turn on the street. Roy realizes with a thud of his heart: _Now_. Reaches, stretches, across the sandwich wrappers bunched between them, across the dizzy air, to kiss her. She pulls back in shock to read his face, but she's never needed more than an instant to do that. Hers goes incandescent. In spite of the pickles.

Their bodies, in the dim, curtain-filtered light of Roy's bedroom, are a little worn, a lot scarred. Riza's breasts are soft and have stretch marks; Roy's skin is not as fine as it was. But they are not old; they're experienced and strong-boned, and they shock each other with their fierceness. There is nothing sweet or autumnal about their first time.

Roy curls over her body, clenched and gasping, and when he's finished she's still coming, every slight movement, every breath, setting off another aftershock. He shimmies down to get his mouth on her, and rides out her orgasm for what feels like minutes.

There are shameless tears in both their eyes; there's incredulous laughter. There is no still point; the world has never yet stopped turning, and will not make exception for such a small thing, on such a perfectly ordinary day. 

25.

It's a foolish, maybe even an asshole question, one he'd never even think of posing, except the answer truly _isn't_ as obvious as it seems it ought to be, and one day, while they're amusing themselves bickering over some point of theory, it just randomly, idly pops out. "Do you miss performing alchemy?" Roy hears his own voice, and immediately begins to catalogue the political consequences of biting off his tongue.

But Ed merely looks over at the sunny stoop, where Nan and Rob are in accord for once, sitting with their knees pressed together and a folio balanced between them. It's a book about hydraulics. Rob, trying to work out one of the figures, pumps his feet up and down illustratively, at which Nan complains loudly that she _gets_ it, it's _easy_ , stop _jiggling_. His kids. 

Ed thinks about giving and getting, Al's awful experimental beard, Riza's pink cheeks and Roy's tiny smile, about the railroad to Xing and the subsidized education bill, the oldest lessons from the island in Dublith and Mei's latest gorgeous broadsheet sitting on the workbench inside. Inking it's going to be a bitch.

He says, and means it with all his heart, "I never stopped."


End file.
